Notes From The Countryside -- I'm in DC This Week
I am in DC this week, absorbing the history preserved and memorialized here in a hundred different places, from the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials to General Washington’s sword and dress uniform in the Smithsonian American History Museum. Not to mention Abe’s and General Sherman’s hats. Something about those humble items makes it real that our whole enterprise has been run by real people.
It is all at once humbling and inspiring. I sat and looked at the actual Star Spangled Banner for ten minutes, thinking how that very battle could have gone either way, how our ongoing democratic experiment and the success to date of our country are the result of effort, of things going right because of that effort, when in fact, things could have gone wrong.
We take it all too much for granted. And I think we’ve let it become too much a situation where we citizens are no longer as sovereign—or as involved—as we used to be. We’ve farmed it out. We vote, yeah, but we’ve abdicated too much responsibility onto too many extremely well-paid bureaucrats in DC who now write the rules that have the force of law we now live by.
I couldn’t help thinking as I walked by the two-block-long EPA building that that agency didn’t exist until Richard Nixon created it. Now it fills a gigantic Greek/Roman revival building two blocks long. I’m not against environmental protection, believe me on this, and they’ve done some very good things. You can now see across LA, and factory owners no longer routinely dump hazardous effluent into streams. But two blocks long? Full of bureaucrats who almost certainly make a salary at least a couple of standard deviations above average? On our dime? And I know from my experience as a middle manager at a Fortune 200, when you have a budget and an organization under you, you try to build it. You try each year to get more. You’re human. It’s what you do.
Anyway, enough of that. DC is full of young, beautiful people, intensely going about their business—probably our business—jogging, talking on their cell phones, politicking over beer in cafes where a hamburger costs fifteen bucks, striding purposefully along DC’s broad streets with their ID badges swinging. And it’s full of Chinese tour groups, families with a hijab-wearing mom, families speaking Spanish—a smiling young mother said “Hola” to me as we were jockeying for a look at the White House—turban-wearing Sikhs, Japanese groups following a flag-carrying leader, and church groups of scrubbed-up kids who, like me, are also from Podunk. In short, it’s an energizing look at our lively cross section.
May we all continue forever to be citizens, not subjects. We are the ones who must make it so.
It is all at once humbling and inspiring. I sat and looked at the actual Star Spangled Banner for ten minutes, thinking how that very battle could have gone either way, how our ongoing democratic experiment and the success to date of our country are the result of effort, of things going right because of that effort, when in fact, things could have gone wrong.
We take it all too much for granted. And I think we’ve let it become too much a situation where we citizens are no longer as sovereign—or as involved—as we used to be. We’ve farmed it out. We vote, yeah, but we’ve abdicated too much responsibility onto too many extremely well-paid bureaucrats in DC who now write the rules that have the force of law we now live by.
I couldn’t help thinking as I walked by the two-block-long EPA building that that agency didn’t exist until Richard Nixon created it. Now it fills a gigantic Greek/Roman revival building two blocks long. I’m not against environmental protection, believe me on this, and they’ve done some very good things. You can now see across LA, and factory owners no longer routinely dump hazardous effluent into streams. But two blocks long? Full of bureaucrats who almost certainly make a salary at least a couple of standard deviations above average? On our dime? And I know from my experience as a middle manager at a Fortune 200, when you have a budget and an organization under you, you try to build it. You try each year to get more. You’re human. It’s what you do.
Anyway, enough of that. DC is full of young, beautiful people, intensely going about their business—probably our business—jogging, talking on their cell phones, politicking over beer in cafes where a hamburger costs fifteen bucks, striding purposefully along DC’s broad streets with their ID badges swinging. And it’s full of Chinese tour groups, families with a hijab-wearing mom, families speaking Spanish—a smiling young mother said “Hola” to me as we were jockeying for a look at the White House—turban-wearing Sikhs, Japanese groups following a flag-carrying leader, and church groups of scrubbed-up kids who, like me, are also from Podunk. In short, it’s an energizing look at our lively cross section.
May we all continue forever to be citizens, not subjects. We are the ones who must make it so.
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